Questions are raised as to commonalities, mutual offerings and possible influences between the two scientific fields. They seem to share a largely similar interest sphere, yet their relationship appears less than optimal. Four different families of approaches to semiotics are briefly outlined. One of them is further detailed, elaborating the framework of Peircean semiotics. It focuses on sign processes or sign effects which are understood as a general type of causation particularly suitable for use in psychological problems. Some issues are dealt with in particular: Perception and action, although phenomenally quite different, can be semiotically construed as equivalent structure formation processes. In addition, the structures formed within the person as mind-brain and those built up outside as culture carry equivalent functions. A prospect is finally given towards a semiotic understanding of the person and self.

Introduction

There are as many semiotics as there are
psychologies. Both fields of scientific endeavor are characterized by
extreme pluralism. Both have a long past and a short history.

Also, both disciplines claim central
positions in the total scientific field. Whereas psychologists, to
sharpen the point, are to explain human action, semioticians contend
to account for human culture. And both have grown explosively in the
recent past, psychology since World War II, semiotics mostly since
the seventies. Yet both enjoy a mixed reputation in scientific and
public opinion.

Have psychology and semiotics deeper
commonalities? Can they offer something to each other? If yes, how
can the two fields mutually impregnate and improve?

Short characterization of the
two fields

Psychology

It is impossible to say in a few lines what
psychology is. So let me just laconically characterize how I for one
prefers to understand the field.

I see it as an ecological science.
The greek word "oikos" refers to the household in a wide sense, i.e.
both a product and an agency of culture, building upon vital and
social instincts and comprising people in context.

In fact, psychology cannot investigate
isolated subjects, because such cannot exist. Thus it is, in my
understanding, the science of the relationship between humans and
their environment, on the level of information exchange rather than
matter-energy metabolism. It studies humans as a part of nature who,
in historical, social, and personal processes, develop themselves as
creators and creatures of their culture.

Semiotics

Since semiotics is less well known, I have
to particularize a bit. Quite often, both semioticians and lay people
cultivate an impression of semiotics that might be characterized as
pars praeter totum, i.e. they do not put but rather take some
part for the whole. For example, semantics of word meaning is
sometimes taken for all of semiotics. Often in discussions with
semiotically interested yet not well informed people, I am tempted to
ask them to forget for the moment what they know about
semiotics.

A reasonable layout of the field might
differentiate among four families of semiotic approaches.
Naturally, chalking them out will not do justice to the hundreds of
versions and distinctions that have been and are discussed in the
literature.

There is a bit of content related
specialization also in semiotics as it compartimentalizes psychology.
You can make out semioticians oriented towards linguistics,
literature, the visual or auditory arts, philosophical, biological,
or computational topics, public relations, fashion etc. etc. But
those applied distinctions are less important here; so basic or
formal distinctions are ruling the present layout.

Semiotics is often defined as the study
of signs. This is on a similar level as when psychology is
defined as the science of behavior. In both cases, that does not say
much. Depending of what you mean by sign or by behavior and depending
on what aspects you emphasize in that study, you get quite different
(sub-)disciplines which, by the way, need not be exclusive of each
other. For an inclusive reference both in terms of topics and
traditions of present-day semiotics and also including large
bibliographies, I recommend Sebeok (1986) or Noeth (1990).

Studying signs can focus (a) on signs as a
special kind of objects, (b) on the meaning of signs, (c) on the use
of signs, and (d) on the effects of signs.

(a) Signs as Objects.

Still quite common in semiotics of today are variants of the classical approach going back to Aristotle, Augustine, Locke, Leibniz and many others. Signs are seen as special objects which have a special meaning and which can, in some respect, represent or substitute other objects.

Aliquid pro aliquo, something for another thing, is a famous formula. A sign or signifier stands for something signed or signified. The distinction between signifiant and signifié of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure of around 1900 has strengthened as well as opened that approach.

Seeing them in such a way, you can "botanize" signs, classify them and investigate whether the coordination between sign objects and sign meaning obeys rules and what kind of rules.

Beyond linguistic signs like phonemes, letters, words or sentences, all kinds of matter and energy configuration in general and their components can in principle be treated as signs. By way of example, I mention phenomena such as gestures (from everyday behavior to artful dance), exchange objects (from souvenirs to money), buildings (from huts to cities), or other cultural codes (from traffic signs to law), etc.

It is as useful and desirable as it is problematic and sometimes deadly to have available all kinds of lists of signs and symptoms with pointers to their respective meaning. Also in psychology, as in medicine, it was and is a dream to be able to "read" people's attributes and behavior as a clue to their personality or potential. Used with care, such encyclopedias of meaning are indispensable aids of social life. All of us have partial and possibly idiosyncratic duplicates of such "lists" in our heads.

However, the problems of this approach should also be obvious. Naturally, everything has its meaning or meanings; it just depends. In fact, the signs-as-objects-approach goes astray in its multiplying attempts at distinctions and definitions: signs against non-signs, this sign class against that, this variant of meaning ... etc., etc. Lastly, this is an approach based on arbitrary fixations which can ever be substituted by alternative fixations.

(b) The Meaning of Signs

From the above, attempts at turning the object approach "upside down" are quite understandable. Semiotics as the science of meaning is both a development of and a reaction to the sign object centration. Variants of structuralism, to be seen as the principal movements of this approach, are based on the conception of distinctive features inaugurated by Saussure and developed by Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev, Jurij M. Lotman, Algirdas J. Greimas and others. A central role in this approach takes a general notion of "text", referring to any texture, including its elements and their relations, of whatever can be composed. Structures of distinctions within texts and beyond in contexts are what constitutes meaning and signs, not vice versa.

It is easy to see that, especially in fields such as literature and the arts, an important motive of producing signs is innovation. Catalogues of signs with fixed meaning can then become as much of a nuisance as of support. If you want to express something that has not been "said" before, you might need to blow sign classes and catalogues. So the basic tenet of this approach is the primacy of meaning.

Examples are hardly traceable in a few words. Think perhaps of a piece of music or architecture. Of course, you can list myriads of sign objects and suggest perhaps meanings for them. But it can be argued that you miss the "essentials" of the piece by exactly this procedure. The process of "going through" the whole of the "text" as a structured ensemble is assumed to generate its meaning ("parcours génératif").

Also the problems of this approach are unjustly dealt with in merely three sentences. Let me note the risk of attempting to elucidate the dark with darkness. Science of any kind needs intersubjectively demonstrable and coordinated reference objects and constructs. Yet, in the optimal case within literary or artistic traditions, commentary can itself become a kind of art.

(c) The Use of Signs

The third approach is the most commonly accepted today. It is based on some theory of communication, more or less influenced from theories of information exchange in technical or biological or social systems. Here, signs are not conceived as either material objects or mental meaning, but rather in view of their function in communicative processes. Signs or signals are considered vehicles or carriers of meaning. Naturally they must be of a material-energetic character; but their essence is the mediation of information between two systems.

This approach, perhaps quite characteristic of the technical Zeitgeist of the second half of the 20th century, owes much of its impetus to Charles W. Morris, a psychologist-sociologist-philosopher of American pragmatist descent. It has been taken up world-wide.

I think I can presuppose some knowledge of this approach in that psychologists are used to think in models of information transfer between some sender and receiver, whether the instances involved are thought to be parts of mechanical or computer systems or of living systems such as brain parts or human speakers and listeners.

Depending on what one prefers to accept as a communicative paradigm, there exist dozens if not hundreds of drawn-out sign-function-models. Some of them can be seen in a general-particular-relationhips; others are wildly competing for attention.

I tend to evaluate the functionalization or focus on sign processes realized in communicative models as a great advance of semiotics. Yet this by no means renders the object or meaning approaches dispensable.

On the other hand, the distinction and definition problems prevalent in the sign as object approach are rather only deferred than solved. Arbitrariness of initial definitions plagues the field. Instead of declaring this or that for a sign, controversy and dogmatisms rages now about questions such as whether the concept of communication should include or exclude intentionality, whether or not a sender is obligatory, whether communication presupposes a code or not, etc.

d) Sign Effects

Difficulties of that kind have instigated a number of semioticians to propose or rather reconsider a more general approach to sign processes which might best be described as the investigation of sign effects.

The American original founder of pragmatic or action oriented thinking, Charles S. Peirce, is certainly the most influential modern semiotician. A large portion of concepts used today in all of the above approaches (e.g. the icon-index-symbol distinction) are owed to Peirce. Yet Peirce, having had his ideas published at lifetime and also posthumously so far in less than desirable manner (Peirce 1932ff, 1982ff), is a revolutionary of science. This fourth approach is largely his living heritage.

Signs in this conception, similar to the meaning approach, are entities that should not be a priori defined and then classified. It is also not sufficient to functionalize traditional sign concepts as in the communication approach. "Signs", whatever that is, are "born from" signs and "procreate" signs. A sign, for Peirce, is anything that has the potential to, in suitable circumstances, create other signs.

Thus the question goes as to the role of "signs" in the becoming of signs. Semiotics then is the study of that case of causation that is carried by signs.

Most of what I have to say in the following in view of mutual benefits from dialogues between semiotics and psychology is to be understood as illustrating this fourth approach. No doubt, communication is an important issue in psychology and in general. But it deserves to find its particular place within a larger field of human cognitive and actional activities.

Typologizing semiotic approaches in four
families, of course, might easily obscure issues that are of impact
across the families. And there are, some utterly important. Let me
just mention the problem of dyadic vs. triadic sign conception or the
question of language being a general model or a particular
concretization of semiotic thinking. I will take up a few of such
issues below.

Let me further note that, in what follows
and in general, I strive to avoid using the terms "sign" and
"meaning" whenever I can, because they are irreducibly polyvalent. Of
course, I need them in reporting the various semiotic traditions.
Otherwise, my usage is untechnical, in an everyday sense.

I. What have Psychology and
Semiotics in common?

From what has been said so far, it is
evident that my thesis will be, the two fields have much in common,
and much deeper than the superficial similarities sketched in the
introduction.

Let's look at the matter first in a
semiotician's perspective.

In spite of the abstract manner the four
approaches had to be described, it is obvious (to some extent also
valid for the sign object approach) that semioticians investigate
sign processes in the framework of systems receiving,
processing and producing signs or sign-type entities. In particular,
those systems refer to living beings, primarily humans.

Now, these are roughly those processes
claimed by psychologists as their subject matter. Terminological
discrepancies should not hide the essential identity.

Scientific psychology is unthinkable without perceptual and behavioral processes, be it as a topic itself or as a methodological requirement. Semioticians would rightly contend them to be of sign-type character.

For example, what the psychological researcher presents to his "subjects", whether conceived as so-called "stimuli" or physical or social situations, are produced or selected by the experimenter as a kind of sign and are taken as such by the subjects. Inferences or generalizations the researcher draws to real life situations imply that the experimental setting somehow represent the latter.

Similarly, what the researcher records and analyses in the form of reactions, behavioral acts or traces, have sign-type character. Whether or not the subject has insight in this state of affairs, and whether or not the researcher explicitly thematizes it, the subject cannot help but give signs to the researcher which the latter analyzes as signs, in that she infers from them something else. The researcher is not interested in the behavior as such, but rather in what it means in this or that respect.

Finally there are semioticians who claim sign-type character for inner-psychic processes as well, foremost among the Peirce himself. Note that it is of no purport for the present discussion of signs, if they are "read" or interpreted rightly or wrongly in what respect ever.

On this background, I am in pains as a
semiotician to understand and accept that psychologists so widely
ignore semiotics notwithstanding the fact that the latter asserts to
offer a general theory of the role of signs or of information-related
processes.

Things are not much better from a
psychologist's point of view.

It is true that many semioticians cultivate
strong interests in psychological topics. Quite a number of papers
and articles at semiotic conferences or in semiotic periodicals deal
with issues typical for psychological publications. However, it is
not always easy for a psychologist to accept what is written in some
of those semiotic contributions. Sometimes, psychological models or
theories are selectively transferred or simplified. And also some
semioticians tend to shield themselves from psychological data
malfitting with their expectations.

It seems to me, however, that constructive
reactions to this state of affairs would be most desirable from both
sides. The first step might be to ask each other what they think they
could offer or demand.

II. What have Psychology and
Semiotics to offer each other?

Instead of listing here a considerable
number of topics that would require extensive context, I propose to
listen to a dialogue, a semiotically interested psychologist (P)
might engage with a psychologically interested semiotician
(S).

Common field, autonomous
approaches

P. Could we make sure from the outset that
we both consider our respective disciplines completely autonomous?
Like mother earth is investigated by many geo-sciences we might need
several and varied approaches to that being-and-becoming of people in
their world.

S. Agreed, of course, this field of
information metabolism between living and other entities in their
environment requires a multifaceted set of descriptions and analyses.
And it would be quite unfortunate to decree beliefs rather than
observe them grow and change and make comparisons.

Difference of
approach

P. Wherein do you see principal differences
between the respective kinds of analyses of our two
disciplines?

S. With Peirce (1902, see CP 1.242ff. and
elsewhere), two broad fields of empirical or object oriented
science can be differentiated, viz. the psychical and the
physical sciences. Psychology along with fields such as
sociology, anthropology, history or linguistics would comprise
psychics at large and would certainly hold a central place in the
group. In addition, psychology might take a special interest in the
area of overlap between the physical and the psychical. It is quite
unfortunate that in its history of roughly a century it preferred to
separate itself along the big break between the physical and the
psychical sciences rather than building bridges based on its
"psychophysical" lookout.

S. On the other hand, semiotics should be
seen primarily as a formal or normative science along with
aesthetics, ethics and logic. Actually for Peirce, semiotics is a
part of logic, or better its more inclusive form. Insofar entities
investigated by psychics always include also physical characters, you
might call semiotics the logics of psychical entities. From
this you might cut out the logics of physical entities as a special
case.

Formal vs.
prescriptive

P. What do you mean by formal science? That
it prescribes, like logic, how propositions and judgments or other
sign complexes are to be formed in order to be true or
valid?

S. Beware! This would be a fundamental
misunderstanding. Semiotics is a strictly formal discipline, yet
built upon observation of the mind in action. In distinction to the
empirical sciences with their respective particular points of view,
it observes on the most abstract level possible. It claims to eschew
particular points of view of observation, and, instead to supply
those general forms of presentation that pertain to
everything. Being evaluative or normative does not include
prescription but rather point out consequences in the pragmaticist
sense. Pragmaticism, for Peirce, is a method for attaining
apprehension of ideas from considerations of the practical bearings
they might possibly have (1878, CP 5.402).

Epistemological priority of the
psychical, ontological indifference

P. What you say is not easy to understand.
Furthermore, you seem to contradict yourself. Having exacted
semiotics as the logics of psychical entities before, you now claim
for it the highest possible abstraction level. Don't you turn the
world upside down? Are the psychical not special cases of the
physical entities?

S. We believe to know that so, because we
have become used to that belief. But where do we know from? It cannot
be more than presumption or prejudice. Insofar we have produced the
assumption of the priority of physical things by psychical means, you
must admit, that our ideas of the physical are epistemologically
subsumed by something "psychical", whatever you like to speculate
about that matter ontologically.

A chance to neutralize
Cartesianism

P. I see, you dismiss Cartesianism. You
might be right, witness so many advances to that effect in many
fields of thought. Psychology, being based on the very idea of
dualism, seems to hold on strongly. And having failed with dualism,
its clinging to materialistic reductionism becomes more and more
obsolete. It seems in need of that Teddy to sleep well. Do you feel
those eternal forms of thought ascribed to Cartesian and Kantian
subjects -- substance, causation, necessity etc. -- to be
fictions?

S. To be special forms of presentation, yes,
but certainly not of the universal scope claimed for them. I think we
should take effort to confine them to where they belong, namely with
nice little closed systems constituted by our thinking. It is true,
we encounter psychical and physical phenomena in our intuition; but
that does not imply that our constructs to understand the world must
refer to either psychical or physical realities. We should not let us
catch by how things act upon us, but rather find out, with the means
available to us, how they act upon each other.

The dialogue becoming a bit philosophical
here and losing itself in jargon, we halt it and add a few additional
turns on more practical concerns of the two sciences.

Semiotic vs. physical conceptions of
causation

S. Now we have suggested and you could agree
from your psychological point of view, that you are not at all happy
with the classical science conception of causation, namely the
necessary and sufficient coordination of effects to causes. You are
in need of a more general conception that concedes effects being
caused but leaves something open for the unpredictable developments
in life courses and in evolution and cultural change. It cannot be a
matter of just not yet knowing all the effective causes. And, as
everybody knows from personal experience, the so-called final causes
produce not exactly, more often than not, what has been
intended.

P. If former beliefs in universal one-to-one
cause-effect-connections are given up or confined to special
conditions in the physical sciences, it is indeed strange that so
many psychologists still operate within deterministic assumptions and
try to reduce the erratic psychical to the certain physical. On the
other hand, I am similarly embarrassed by nominalistic or
constructivistic proposals which supplant causative connections from
concrete reality out there over into the minds of observers.

Taking serious the reality of
interpretation

S. So you are pursuing a conception of
causation which considers the fact of interpretation in the world
itself. You are after a conception of "conditioning", in the most
general sense, which sees entities like living systems not simply and
merely as results of adaptation to some independently given reality.
You feel that organisms, social systems, persons, and cultures can
show something that is neither simply by chance nor simply
preprogrammed. You are sure, they are capable, to some extent, of
"making history".

P. Since you maintain that semiotics in the
wake of Peirce is exactly providing conceptual means for this, I am
curious to learn how it is done. Semiotics provides a general form
of thought or presentation which avoids dualism and does not play
the game of ontological priority of either the physical or the
psychical. Epistemologically it accepts the primacy of the mind.
However, it approaches it empirically, not by postulating a Kantian
or other "logical" a priori.

This form of thought or presentation is of
triadic nature. Sign-types do not represent a thing, but rather
present the relations between entities for forming further
relations.

III. How can Psychology and
Semiotics mutually impregnate?

Also my third question can be served in only
an exemplary fashion. What I aspire is to make plausible that old
habits of thought might be broken in both fields and lead towards
revision in promising ways through interdisciplinary cooperation.
Notwithstanding, the engagement to bring fruits will take some time.
For illustrating how impregnation could work in both directions I
have chosen to deal with two topics and mention a third.

1. Perception and action can
be dealt with semiotically in equivalent terms

I have tried so far to draw your attention
away from the sign to the sign process, antecedents and consequences
of creating sign-type entities. It is time to introduce Peirce's
concept of Semiosis, by which he means "an action, or
influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three
subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its Interpretant, this
tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions
between pairs" (1906, CP 5.484). Semiotics is understood thus as
the study "of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of
possible Semiosis".

Some examples after Peirce might make the three subjects or parts of semiosis more understandable.

A piece of music can be seen as a sign (or, to use Peirce' s more precise term, a Representamen) the object of which rests in the composers or performers project and intents and the (emotional) Interpretant would to found in the listeners emotions and thoughts.

A command uttered by an officer would be the sign-representamen of his command plan as an "object"; the executed command, i.e. the soldiers' behavior, would correspond to the (energetic) Interpretant.

A word or sentence or argument is taken as the Representamen of their subject (object), including their predicative or argumentative connex; in understanding, an (logical) Interpretant emerges which might rest in the meaning attained by somebody, i.e. a mental matter.

Now it must be pointed out that such coordinations between semiosis parts and real word entities, which appear to be the game among some semioticians, are quite ambiguous and perhaps can never really satisfy for lack of consistency and unanimity.

In addition the parts of semiosis appear to refer to psychologically utterly different events. Semiosis, as can be easily seen from these and other examples, sometimes refers to perception or understanding, sometimes also actions are involved.

Finally, it seems to me, that the Cartesian split so sharply and rightly attacked by Peirce (1867/68, see CP 1.545-599 and 5.213-317), has not really been given up. Some parts of semiosis are defined materially, others, however, mentally.

On this background which cannot be further
elaborated here, I am seeking a more elementary concept of
semiosis. I believe to have found it by assuming the typical
communicative or interactive processes used in the examples above and
elsewhere to be semiosically aggregated. ** The communicative
models of semiosis (of the 3rd approach family above) would thus
become special cases of a more general semiotic model, i.e. the
semiosic effect model.

** It is common to distinguish between the terms semiotics, semiotical etc. for the scientific field and semiosic, semiosical etc. as pertaining to the process of semiosis.

In fact, in making this proposal, I apply
psychological fundamentals to the problem. Peirce being the child of
an epoch psychologically dominated by the idea of consciousness,
often struggles and occasionally resigns to make distinctions between
the psychical (as the immediately experienced) and the psychological
(as our conceptions thereof) clear to his readers. This is easier
today and we have less scruples to follow his advanced ideas on
"analogues of consciousness" (CP 5.485). Remember: semiosis is a
formal concept to be defined by how things act upon each other rather
than by their impressions on us.

The essentials of an elementary
semiosis concept, reinterpreting** Peirce in certain respect, can
now briefly be sketched.

** I believe to proceed not only in the spirit of Peircean semiotics but can point to many passages in his works going in the same direction. I hope to give my arguments elsewhere.

Like Peirce I think of semiosis as an
indivisible whole which can be construed as a process or as a
structure and of which three mutually related moments can be
distinguished, namely a source, a mediator, and a
resultant. All three may appear to us as of material and/or
mental character. However, better is to understand them as both or
neither, because they play their role in semiosic processes as
specially formed entities or structures whose effects rest as much on
their matter-energy as on their form characters.

The source I call a Referent, i.e.
the structure on which a semiosis sets on, the structure which it
elaborates.

For the mediator I take from Peirce the term
Interpretant. Peirce has also used this term in the sense of
mediator, although his passages identifying Interpretant with mental
meaning prevail. The former corresponds closer than the one preferred
today in the semiotic community to general usage of the term. In
semiosis, a source structure is translated into a resultant structure
by means a of an interpreting system.

So the resultant is something that refers
via its Interpretant to its Referent. I therefore name it the
Representant in preference to Peirce's
"Representamen".

I feel this expression to be less clumsy and
yet to come nearest to its possible effects. For example, a diplomat
can only so long be called a Representant of, as long as he stays in
some connection with, his country. You should not be lead to think of
the Representant as something self-contained.

You should also understand it in clear
distinction from the common concept of (symbolic) representation,
which is supposed to carry a meaning all by it self. Contrary to many
common beliefs in semiotics, I insist that a Representant does not
substitute or replace its Referent but connects to it via its
Interpretant. A Representant taken as such, e.g. in its material
character, is or does nothing semiosical. In choosing this term which
is neither -at nor -and, I also wish to emphasize the
active-passive double role of Interpretants and
Representants.

Taking these concepts to Peirce's examples
they seem to me to appear in a new light. The command example, for
instance, would differentiate to a chain or tree of several
semiosises.

The first of them could be coordinated to
the command plan of the officer (as a Referent) and his
language competence (as an Interpretant) with the voiced
command (as its Representant). This semiosis is an executive
type semiosis or from the person outgoing; I name it
ExtrO-semiosis.

A second semiosis is taking up the
specifically formed sound trace (the Rep of the first, now becoming
the Ref of the second) by the hearing and understanding
competencies and habits of the soldiers including their present
attitudes (as its Int). In each of the present soldiers their
Ints might slightly differ; so we will have to observe the resultant
momentaneous states of the soldiers receiving a command as the
Reps of their ingoing or IntraO-semiosises. Note the
semiosic branching at this stage into different individuals, although
I keep here the presentation on the type level.

The third link in this chain can be
characterized as a processing semiosis within the person of each
soldier. I name this sign-process an IntrA-semiosis. Even if
we assume some routine automatism or however much of reflective
decision making or simple and complex psychological processes proper
of all sorts we can conjecture, we have to admit of a fundamental
process type. Semiotically conceived, it includes some input state (a
Ref, the reinterpreted Rep of the second link in the chain)
which, on the basis of the complete cognitive and motivational
preconditions and potentials in each soldier (the present Int)
is transformed or transfigured into a readiness or some similar state
to execute the command (Rep). Of course, a similar
IntrA-semiosis has to be presumed, by the way, in the psychological
organization proper of the officer before he expressed his
command.

The example of Peirce comprises even a forth
semiosis, namely again one of the ExtrO-semiosis-type, this
time in other persons. The soldiers act, supposedly, in that their
executive preparedness (the Rep of before, now taken as a
Ref) is interpreted by their motor habits or routines
(Int), i.e. their readiness is consumed by obliging to the
command, in this case by laying down the gun (Rep). Remember
that their IntrA-semiosis, under some circumstances, might have lead
to a disobedient state or something akin.

Elsewhere (Lang 1992 b and c) I have
presented this conception as a semiotic formulation of the ideas of
Jakob von Uexküll and of Kurt Lewin. The (semiotic) function
circle of the former and the theory of science as well as the
psychological field theory of the latter were indispensable sources
of inspiration, the Peircean semiotics providing a perfect formal
instrument for making the synthesis.

From this example it can easily be
conjectured, and this is in fact my reformulation of the Peircean
semiosis concept, that semiosis is nothing but a process of
structural change: semiosis is the formal concept presenting how
new structures emerge from existing structures under influence of
third structures.

In other words, by meeting a specific
Interpretant structure, a Referent structure forms a further
Representant structure in a semiosic process. You might turn this
sentence around in three equivalent versions because the three
moments are thought to mutually constitute themselves, whereas
linguistic habits ask for one grammatical either active or passive
subject.

It is impossible to make out in any way any
one of the three moments of semiosis to be super- or subordinated to
any other one. The Interpretant can determine the Referent as much as
vice versa, as you can see in the fact that an Interpretant is
co-constitutive of a Referent. For example, the voiced command of the
officer would be just noise or air vibration to some other
Interpretant, whereas for hearing and linguistically competent humans
it is a sentence and, in particular, for the command habituated
soldier, it is a specific order.

In addition, the Representant is
co-determining as well. Look at the first semiosis of the example: to
voice a command presupposes the air can be put into a formed
vibration by vocal behavior, and one that can arrive at the ear of an
addressee strong enough and undistorted. This should not be taken for
granted; it is by evolutionary selection that it has entered, as in
so many other cases, morphological and behavioral dispositions. Also
you might easily think of various degrees of determination of a
particular semiosis by any feasible combination or relative import of
the three moments.

In sum, the three structures involved in a
semiosis are intrinsically related and cannot be semiotically
investigated except as a triadic whole. However, empirically, they
can and should be separately presented and their respective role in a
semiosis demonstrated whenever this is feasible. This is easier in
ExtrO- and in IntrO-semiosis than in IntrA-semiosis. Sometimes, a
semiotic analysis is more of a heuristic to point out particular
moments than an actual empirical achievement. How can moments of a
semiosis be empirically presented? There is no other method than
semiosis, namely bringing Interpretants of the researcher in touch
with Referents of his subject matter and having that encounter packed
into a suitable set of (scientific) Representants.

What I have so far presented is a general
semiotic conception of triadic causation to replace the idea of
postulating a single necessary and sufficient (set of) condition for
anything to occur. Semiotic causation, of course, is the more general
type of causation. For it provides for systems to assume new states
and, particularly for systems to develop in an open mode rather than
by necessity. In fact, traditional necessity concepts of causation
are seen as a limiting case of semiotic causation: when the import of
an Interpretant approaches zero, Referent and Representant enter
either a necessary or a chance relationship and we can speak of
simple causes and effects.

Occasionally it is opportune to supplement
the present process view of semiosis by a logical thought form
abstracting from any event character. The logical elementary semiotic
unit, or triad of Reference, Interpretance, and Representance,
might be named a Semion. This reminds the chemical "Ion" and
might indicate that we deal here with a dynamic building block of
semiotic structures which functions both as an instrument and as a
product of (semiosic) development.

A further positive side-product of
elementary semiotic is a triadic redefiniton of the classical
semiotic subfields of semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.
They have been, as they were proposed by Morris (1938, 1946; see
1971), dyadically reduced. But I cannot go into details
here.

Elementary semiosis can be readily
applied to psychological or ecological issues including
communication. It forces the researcher to conceive of any of his
subject matter in genetic series or trees (see Lang 1992 b). Nothing
can exist if not as moment in semiosic condition and effect chains
and trees. Note that semiosic trees can be of diverging or branching
( such as in phylogenesis), of converging or rooting (such as in
ancestry) type, and of both combined. To understand anything means to
point out its antecedent and consequent semiosises both in structure
and process.

First we look briefly at a "productive"
or ExtrO-semiosis. It is strangely neglected in semiotics as well
as in psychology in comparison to the ingoing processes.

The production of signs, however, is the
usual precondition of their interpretation. Indeed, in my conviction,
it is advisable to construe of semiosis as always equivalent to
some production or constitution of new structures (signs) through
existing structures (signs). The crucial point is: you need not
presuppose any subject in the Cartesian sense (see below). For,
Referents and Interpretants, as a rule, have themselves arisen as
Representants from other semiosises.

You might object with the case of "natural
signs" or symptoms which are given or have not been produced as
signs. It is obvious that this recurring controversial problem does
not exist in elementary semiotics. Symptoms or anything given does
not have sign-character or not per se. It gets sign-character only
when it becomes a Referent of some semiosis. Naturally practically
everything can be "read"; equally naturally, its "meaning" can depend
as much on its Interpretant than on its proper traits as a Referent.
Semiotically, symptoms or "natural signs" in general mean what they
produce as Representants in the various possible semiosises referring
to those objects.

Obviously, then, my preferred semiosic
paradigm is that of action or generally of the semiosic act
producing a small or large, a transient or enduring change of the
world. (Rep) by or through suitable actualizations
(Int) under given preconditions (Ref). Representants,
re-interpreted as Referents, can draw any number and branches of
further semiosises.

It might be worth while in this connection
to point out the minute measure of attention given by 20th century
psychology to effects of action. Even in the so-called action
theories of the Leontiev- or Miller-Galanter-Pribram- and similar
varieties, it is action planning, i.e. cognitively anticipated goals
rather than their concrete effects, that draw the researchers'
interest. Even in the traditions building on the law of effect,
reinforcement effects back on the behaving system itself are
preferably studied to near exclusion of effects of actions on the
social and cultural systems at large.

Let us now look also at perceptive or
receptive acts or IntrO-semiosis.

It will perhaps amaze you when I contend,
from an elementary semiotic point of view, perception or
IntrO-semiosis to present exactly the same basic construal
as the productive or outgoing semiosis.

I interpret the perceptive subsystem of an
individual in its actual state as an Interpretant. In perception this
(system of) Interpretant is effected upon ("stimulated") by the
actual surrounding world situation; or, this can only analytically be
distinguished, the perceptual system orients itself by its
dispositions (e.g. light is that portion of electromagnetic energy an
eye is sensitive for) or by its actual "motivation" (adaptation,
activation, set, expectations, defenses, etc.) towards particular
surface aspects of the surrounding world. This often hard to
differentiate encounter of a Referent and an
Interpretant emerges in a Representant which we might
simply identify as the percept.

However you want to conceive of the percept
-- transient or enduring as memory, stored as new elements or
integrated into preexisting systems, retained as entered or becoming
part of ever evolving wholes -- you have to think of them as a
material trace on the one hand and as a potential of effect chains or
trees that cannot exhaustively be described by material dispositions.

Even as a deep in the wool dyed reductionist
you have to admit that you learn little by analyzing brain parts or
processes involved in a particular sign process, because brain
processes function in quite similar fashion everywhere and everytime
in the brain. On the other hand you infer the existence and character
of some perceptual trace in the Mind-Brain when you succeed in making
it effective in a new semiosis presenting to you its respective
character in sign productive Representants. This is true even when
you do not at all attain to locate or even catch the internal "sign"
as a material trace.

If, however, we conceive the percept as a
sign-type Representant which can become a Referent in a large
potential of suitable IntrA- and ExtrO-semiosises, we have gained a
descriptive system more pervasive than the traditional conceptual
repertoire of perception psychology. I for one believe, we have a
better heuristic guide for research. Even if this should prove wrong
we are capable of seeing commonalities between perception and action
that eschew traditional reasoning and method. For a simple example
see our study on residential transactions (Lang 1992 a).

You might further conjecture and spin on a
thread started by Peirce when he offers his semiosis as a candidate
concept to describe and understand what is happening
inner-psychologically, in the non-Cartesian Mind-Brain
itself.

2. Semiotics offers
descriptive tools for dealing with transitions between structures and
processes

If you take the last idea seriously you
would describe the whole of the Psyche or psychological organization
of an individual at a given time as a semiosic structure that has
been built up in myriads of semiosises rooted in a long phylo- and
ontogenetic evolution. Parts of the complex function as Interpretants
in perceptive, other parts as Interpretants and Referents in actional
processes of ecological encounters between the individual and its
environment.

My fascination with this type of perspective
is in part due to its potential for construing structures and
processes as two faces of the same entity. This is a problem that has
rarely been satisfactorily attacked in empirical sciences. Witness
the separation of processing and storing in the computer metaphor of
the brain. It is easy in mathematics and it promises to become more
feasible in parallel-distributed-processing computers or "neuronal
net" models. Triadic elementary semiotic is an additional promising
model.

Now I have mostly spoken of the ecological
processes of information exchange between persons and the environment
and concentrated on the Brain-Mind- structures constituted by
IntrO-semiosis and used in ExtrO-semiosis. Are there any objections
against applying the same conceptuality on external structure
formations, i.e. in the environment of acting persons.

ExtrO-semiosis is perpetually producing
sign-type structures in the surrounds of any acting agent. And many
of those structures then, immediately or later on, are available to
them for further semiosic chains or branches like any internal memory
structures, except they begin with an IntrO-semiosis. Certainly our
environment determines our behavior and development, however mediated
by successions of IntrO-, IntrA- and ExtrO-semiosic go-betweens. In
addition, and I think this particularly important, external
structures are available to other individuals with roughly similar
interpretive dispositions. They are ready to become Referents for
their Interpretants. These external structures, in the main, are
subsumed under the rubric of culture, i.e. the self-produced and
evolving semiosic environment of communities of
people.

We have our knowledge partly within our
heads, partly in libraries and a large variety of cultural objects
that are potential semiosic Referents, or that comprise, in the
semiotic sense, information for suitable Interpretants.

Distributed structures as a basis for action
and proper development is no invention of the mind in the narrow
sense. Morphologically and ethologically, such structures have
evolved early in phylogenesis. Some of them are parts of organisms,
some are their behavioral dispositions or instincts, some are
products put into the environment on the basis of instinctual
behavior or planned action. Look for example into the analogical
series of, say, egg, uterus, marsupial pouch, nesting cave, collected
and built nest, cradle, and nursery for bringing up the young. Or
think of similar series of semiotic devices for controlling others
and one's relationship with them, such as scent marks, pheromones,
distance management, display behavior, plumage, built structures,
uniforms and the thousands and millions of human made gadgets, from
small to carry around to large to make big cities.

It is evident that culture has brought an
enormous amplification of the semiotic potential to humans in
comparison to the rather limited and largely fixed sign repertoire of
animals. In elementary semiotic I see the possibility of treating the
seemingly different with equal conceptual tools: tools which are
themselves, of course, of essential sign-character.

If this semiotic perspective on perception
and action, on internal psych(olog)ical and external cultural
structures appears to you not completely nonsensical, I would like to
add briefly a further conjecture in order to point out the direction
semiotic thinking in psychology might eventually go.

3. You need not presuppose
"subjects": semiosically such can constitute themselves.

It is a strange matter of course in Western
psychological thinking that we presuppose the existence of persons,
and only of individual persons, as "subjects" in the Cartesian sense.
True, developmental psychologists study their change in ontogenesis.
But their initial constitution is taken for given. Only
metaphorically, it seems, the idea of being a subject is lent to
animals or to groups of people. Completely dark and widely
undiscussed is the question of their origin. The related issue of
begin and end of individual life is at least treated with in
operational terms.

Peirce and a few of his modern interprets
(e.g. Singer 1984, Colapietro 1989) have outlined a semiotic
conception of what we call the subject that does not take it apart
from the functioning of the person. If you construe, along the lines
of a triadic semiotic sketched above, of the person as a semiosic
structure in becoming, then understanding its origin can dispose
of the Cartesian postulation.

"A person is, in truth, like a cluster of stars, which appears to be one star when viewed with the naked eye, but which scanned with the telescope of scientific psychology is found on the one hand, to be multiple within itself, and on the other hand to have no absolute demarcation from a neighbouring condensation." (Peirce 1893, Ms. 403)

Conclusion

I have treated a couple of topics out of a
very complex theme and in addition dared to, I hope constructively,
criticize some of the current views. It would be, I hope to have made
plausible, as mindless for psychology and semiotics to live
ignorantly apart as to give up one's own respective identity. Yet to
join senses and forces in a mutual interest engagement or marriage
might bring evolution and benefits to both. Psychology can acquire
means of dealing with culture, semiotics gains by observing effects
of signs in their most productive psychological province. Yet only
time will demonstrate whether or not some mutual engagement between
members of the two disciplines can bear fruits.

References

Colapietro, Vincent M. (1989) Peirce's
approach to the self: a semiotic perspective on human
subjectivity. New York, State Univ. Press.